popular romance, _The Choir Invisible_, has its scene laid in and near
the Lexington of the eighteenth century. Nor is he innocent of the
devices of local color. His earliest collection of tales--_Flute and
Violin_--and his ingratiating comment upon it--_The Blue-Grass Region of
Kentucky_--once for all established the character which his chosen
district has in the world of the imagination. But from the first he held
principles of art which would not allow him to consider either history
or local color as ends in themselves. He believed they must be
employed, when employed, as elements contributory to some general effect
of beauty or of meaning. He has built up beauty with the most deliberate
hands, and he has sought to express the highest meanings in his art,
seeking to look through the "thin-aired regions of consciousness which
are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where are
situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the cyclopean
youth, Instinct."

In this important program, however, he has constantly been handicapped
by his orthodoxies. John Gray, in _The Choir Invisible_, loving a woman
who though in love with him is bound in marriage to another, engages
himself to a young girl, shortly afterward to find that his real love is
free again; yet with a high gesture of sacrifice he holds to his
engagement and enters upon a union of duty which is sure to make two,
and possibly three, persons unhappy instead of one, though all of them
are equally guiltless. Mr. Allen approves of this immoral arithmetic
with a sentimentalism which has drawn rains of tears down thoughtless
cheeks. So in _The Reign of Law_ he exhibits a youth extricating himself
from an obsolete theology with sufferings which can be explained only on
the ground that the theology was too strong ever to have been escaped or
the youth too weak ever to have rebelled. And in _Aftermath_, sequel to
_A Kentucky Cardinal_, the author sentimentally and quite needlessly